I have David Daniels' baby!!

It's true:
David Daniels earned fame in the independent animation world as the inventor of the stratacut technique of animation. Normally, when someone invents a new filmmaking technique, it gets ripped off by someone a lot bigger who gets credit for it. For example, bullet time was not invented for the Matrix; an independent filmmaker named Dayton Taylor had been using what he called a "Timetrack" camera years before The Matrix came out. And a recent art school graduate named Javan Ivey devised "stratastencil" animation, which now shows up in this Pharell video. David Daniels' stratacut claymation is unique for the fact that it hasn't been stolen by anyone big -- he's still the one and only master of stratacut over twenty years after he unveiled it in his film Buzz Box [you MUST click on this link].


Stratacut animation is achieved by sculpting a "log" of clay with images embedded inside. You set up the camera so it's looking at a cross-section of the log, and then you start slicing thin layers off and taking a new picture each time. The animation is all programmed into the log of clay: if you wanted to have a circle grow, you would construct a cone shape and slice it from the thin end to the fat end. Thus, time is translated into depth, resulting in 2D animation whose 3rd dimension is time. This seems simple when you're only making a circle grow, but stratacut gets a lot more complicated:


Stratacut on this scale boggles the mind. Not just my mind, but EVERYONE'S. And that's why no one has stolen it yet. David's the only one who understands it!

Here's the point: David Daniels is one of the founders of Bent Image Lab, and I had the pleasure of meeting him today. About 30 seconds after I shook his hand, he gave me that stratacut baby from right off his desk (it's for a mutual friend, but heck, I still felt like it was Christmas). He was generous not only with his stratacut sculptures, but also with his time, and we talked about college, film careers, and the future of stratacut. I told him he should come do a lecture at Harvard (this is the second time I've blurted this out to a professional animator), and he said he'd try!

In other news, Tooey's August cake party was this last weekend. She mailed me an invitation that said, "Eat Cake! (this Sunday at 2pm) Poop Cake! (later)". It was a nice reunion with the people from last month. I tried to make a conquistador helmet but it looked like a dunce cap.

Wisdom from the Art Department

After about a month here, I have transcended the ennui of art department work and found enlightenment. Every layman's definition of stop-motion animation includes the word "tedious." You move a puppet one frame at a time, only finishing a second of animation after 24 frames. But even before that, you have to build the puppet out of wire, foam, cloth, and clay, and build the set he's standing in, and build the props he's holding. The animation component of stop-motion takes less time than the preparation for it. Sometimes, you wonder whether all this building is worth the animation at all...



This is particularly true in the land of commercials, where if you're doing a 15-second spot, and if four seconds of that gets used up with live action and shots of the logo, then you've got a total of about 11 seconds of animation. For an example, watch the commercial above, which Bent Image Lab made last year. In those 11 seconds, the commercial packs in 9 shots of animation, many of which are about half a second long. Nevertheless, every detail has to be fully realized. For instance, did you notice the items on the shelf inside the van? Probably not -- they're out of focus and in the background for less than a second. But rest assured that someone spent several days constructing and painting all of them, including the ones off-screen that never show up in the commercial at all.

So if no one's really going to see these things, why take the time to make them look good? Well, for one thing, somebody made the shelves, and somebody else made the back wall. A half-hearted job on the shelf items would tarnish the good work that the other artists have done. So part of the motivation behind doing good detail work is respect for the detail work everyone else is doing.

But what about the shelf items that we never see onscreen? Why bother making them at all? Oftentimes, the storyboard won't reflect the exact shot the director decides to use, and so first of all, it's unclear exactly what will be seen until they start shooting, so it's best to make things as if they will show up. Also, it's a matter of giving the director options. If a background element looks like crap, the artist who made it has essentially made a decision for the director that that element will not show up onscreen.

And ironically, in the land of commercials where most props get maybe three seconds of screen time, it is especially important for the art department's work to be impeccable. The client has 15 seconds to convince the TV audience that they NEED this product. There's no cushion time for the spectator's mind to wander. The mind control has to be perfect and complete. So if someone's watching a commercial and thinking, "Wow, that brick wall looks like they printed out a pattern from Google images..." then the commercial fails and it's the art department's fault.

See, I bet you never thought that art department peons like me are the titans that hold on our shoulders the global consumer economy. Well, now you know. So don't honk at me when I ride my bike on Division Street.

That scene in Ratatouille, and Flugtag

You remember that scene in Ratatouille when Colette tells Linguini about all the other cooks working at Gusteau's? So-and-so fought with the resistance, this other guy killed someone using only his thumb... It's the scene where the new guy meets everyone else, and they all seem to have unique quirks. It happens in almost all of the Pixar movies: "I'm from Playskool." - "I'm from Mattel!"

Well, last week was that scene at Bent Image Lab. Work-wise, I was still occupied with those crates, now encircling each of them in plastic wrap, which I have to confess didn't really hold my interest. So I kept things lively with conversation. Our painter, for example, legally changed his last name from Sullivan to Superstar. So did his wife. The supervisor of the art department moonlights as a DJ, and a seamstress in the back of the room is also the front-man for a cyber-techno-glamour band called Fleshtone. My favorite surprise was watching Kimmy, a young, bubbly art director, collect dead grubs from a wasp nest so that she could make molds from them and cast a necklace / earring set.

Over the weekend, I had another great Portland experience. High-school friend Ben and I returned to Waterfront Park on Saturday, having recently enjoyed the Brewers Festival there, this time to attend Portland's second Red Bull Flugtag (German for "flight day). The idea is that teams of amateurs join together and construct homemade airplanes out of cheap materials. The plane has to carry one passenger, and the rest of the team has to push it off an elevated pier into water, with the goal of flying it as far as possible. The airplanes are based on a funny / creative / preachy environmentalist theme, and the flights are preceded by skits, of widely divergent quality. Begin photo essay:

It was packed. This is only a fraction of the 80,000 people that filled Waterfront Park.

People even took boats out to watch from the water.

This guy climbed a lamppost for a better view.

As we made our way through the crowd, we got to see the lineup of airplanes waiting for their turn. This flying squirrel craft had notably dismal chances at staying in the air. Cool design note: the beer bottle plane behind the squirrel actually poured "beer" out the front when they unscrewed the cap. Despite this, it proved incapable of flight.

The "Banana Boat" took a pretty spectacular nosedive.

Our friends in the Flying Squirrel didn't do much better.

This was the best flight I saw. Very exciting to see a plane actually fly instead of just dive bombing ten feet away from the pier.

Well, what else can I say about Flugtag? I've never been to anything like it, but I hope to see more of it in the future. It was a lot of fun - there were kids, teenagers, old people all spending the afternoon outside enjoying the entertainment. I was thinking the whole afternoon that Flugtag was right up MIT's alley -- maybe they'll hold it in Boston one of these days...

Pallets and Porters

This week, there was good news and bad news. Remember that big warehouse set we had to fill up with crates? Crates made of paper we had to cut, foam cubes we had to sand, and glue we had to wash out of our clothes? Well, we finished them! It took four interns four days, but we did it! (That's the good news.)

The bad news was: next, we had to make a forklift pallet for each one. This involved more X-Acto knives and more glue, with the difference that these pallets were so fragile that you could demolish one just by resting your elbow in the wrong place.
But even though these took more time and more care than the crates did, they were more satisfying to make. I think we felt like there was more craftsmanship involved, so we could be proud of the work. My frustration with the crates was that I thought, "Any old Schmoe can make these things... " Which may be true, but it doesn't necessarily mean interns can; in the end, the art director rejected about half of the crates we had made. Whoops!

After work hours, I spent a lot of time with an old high school friend of mine named Ben. He's a student at Portland's Lewis & Clark College, and this week, we explored another reason twenty-somethings love Portland: beer. Portland is home to many, many microbreweries. Ben and I went to one of them, the Rogue brewpub, for a friend's birthday. In addition to hot dogs and hamburgers made from Kobe beef, Rogue serves delicious dark beers. Mine was a mocha porter. They also offer hazelnut and chocolate brews.

I was also excited to find out that July is Beer Month in Portland. Ben and I celebrated by going to the Oregon Brewers Festival on Friday, along with his friend Maddy. The festival was in an enclosed section of Waterfront Park. There were two huge tents, one on each end of the enclosure, which together housed about eighty beers. You buy beer with wooden tokens worth a dollar each. A sample of beer costs one token, a full mug costs four. And of course you have to drink the beer out of your very own 2008 Oregon Brew Fest official souvenir mug made out of genuine recyclable plastic ($5).

At first, we went for beers with delicious-sounding names, like Dragon's Milk, Pliny the Elder, and Quilter's Irish Death. We bought the one-token samples in order to maximize our sampling range, but soon found that it was also a good way to maximize our beer intake. This was particularly true for Maddy, a cute Filipina girl, whose "samples" tended to be larger than ours.Ben and I decided the Best In Show was the Almond Brown Ale from Standing Stone Brewing Co, Ashland, OR. Maddy concurred with our other decision that the Worst In Show was Widmer Bros.' Full Nelson IPA, which tasted like alcoholic armpit sweat. Appropriate for a beer named after an illegal wrestling move.

Since that was the last weekend in July, there are no more beer festivals in the cards. But there are still plenty of microbrews to be sampled, and as Dorothy Parker (quoted in some beer literature we read this weekend) once said, "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."

"Animation" in Portland

Well, better late than never.

I'm not just referring to my blog. (For the record, I was on tour with the Harvard Glee Club until a week ago, which is why I'm posting for the first time today.) "Late" describes a good portion of my experience with this internship.

For instance, I only heard on June 20th that I had an internship at all. That left me three weeks to buy a plane ticket and find a place to live. So, I bought a plane ticket and started looking for a place to live.

And kept looking for a place to live.

On July 13, the Glee Club tour ended. And I was still looking for a place to live. Maybe other people were beating me to the sublets; maybe my inquiries made me sound like a sociopath; or maybe Craig's List just isn't the most reliable way to find housing. In any case, two days before I was scheduled to arrive in Portland, I finally found a sublet.

And here I am. I only got to work two days before this weekend, but I'll tell you what I know. The company is Bent Image Lab (http://www.bentimagelab.com). It's a small animation studio which produces commercials and music videos. It does both CG (3D computer) and stop-motion animation, of which the latter is my interest. I've been working in Bent's art department, which is where the sets, puppets, and props are made, to be used later by the animators on set. This last couple days, I've been cutting paper and gluing it to foam cubes in order to fill a large warehouse set with crates. I haven't been doing this alone; there are three other interns working with me. We're all about the same age, 20 or 21. Two of them go to CalArts, an animator factory, and the other goes to a liberal arts college whose name I forgot.

But enough about animation. What about Portland? Well, first off, I'll say that this is a great town for twenty-somethings. And apparently, that's no secret, because Portland is full of twenty-somethings. Part of it is that the streets are very bike-friendly. There are also farmers' markets all over the place and open-mics every night. In short, it's a town that attracts the easygoing, "herb"-smoking, tattooed and perforated set that likes their music acoustic and their coffee fair-trade. Earlier today, I attended a "cake party," put on by Tooey, a friend of my housemate Kate. (Tooey, I'd like to add, is also the nickname of the carnivorous flower in "Little Shop of Horrors.") Tooey's cake parties are "for friends and strangers," which means that Tooey invites all her friends, all well as anyone she happens to run into at open mic nights, farmers' markets, etc. The draw is that she bakes a cake for each party, and in the cake are hidden secret goodies. Today someone found a slip of paper with an unlabeled phone number, under which Tooey had written, "It was her birthday three days ago!!!" And so the idea behind the cake parties is that Portland's twenty-somethings, uprooted and adrift, friendless in a bike-friendly city, will meet each other over homemade cake and find people with common interests. I should have known that it was going to be soul-crushingly awkward. It was the kind of overbearing awkwardness that makes people pluralize nouns by adding "-ness", as in, "Could you pass the marionberry-ness?" But of course, Tooey had seen this coming, and came to the rescue by providing an activity to distract us during awkward silences: making funny hats out of construction paper! Hmm. Call me a curmudgeon, but I wasn't convinced. I squatted, noncommittal, while men and women five years older than me (and older still) cut and stapled colored paper into creative shapes and adorned their heads with the results. The cake was cut, the drinks poured, the blueberry ice cream passed around the circle, and soon I found myself in a conversation with this guy here in the blue shirt. Turned out he's working with a friend on an animation project of their own. We both liked the Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, and I recommended the work of Yuri Norstein. Soon I had met several other people, all wearing funny hats, and Tooey eventually plopped hers onto my head. By the end of the party, I had tossed the Frisbee, thrown a boomerang, tried out someone's recumbent bike, and sat down to listen to Kate play the fiddle in an impromptu bluegrass jam. In other words, I ended up having a really good time. These cake parties happen once a month. Maybe by mid-August I'll have a friend I can bring to the next one.